Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

cyber.harvard.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 92 posts

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#51

Post by rsynnott »

closedloop129 wrote: post #7
beebmam wrote: post #5

For sure, the UK was deeply responsible for so much death and suffering from the Opium trade in China in this era. Just like modern China (and Mexico) should be considered deeply responsible for the current massive opioid crisis in the United States: 1. https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-... 2. https://www.science.org/content/article/underground-labs-chi... 3. https://www.npr.org/2020/11/17/9…

If the drugs are produced in China and thus are available there, why doesn't China (nor Mexico) have the same level of problems? And the other way round: For sure, Opium was imported to England. Why didn't it become a problem?

The drug dealers were British subjects, in general. China didn't have an easy way to punish them (the actual merchants responsible generally wouldn't be entering China), but Britain absolutely did, so could enforce its own laws against opium (which were then fairly strict; it would've been a death penalty thing). Britain _did_ have an opium problem, incidentally, but the volumes imported were just much smaller.

Opium was produced in British India, not China, for the most part.

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#52

Post by rsynnott »

> Take tea and rhubarb, for example; the foreign countries cannot get along for a single day without them.

I'm curious where the idea that rhubarb was a major dependency came from. Or indeed the idea that it was a Chinese monopoly; it was grown in Europe in this era.

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#53

Post by rsynnott »

ginko wrote: post #49
dash2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people think banning drugs is a bad idea, and that it's better to allow free trade. A good response to that would be, "yeah, but it was for the Chinese to make their minds up about that, not the British!" And a good response to that might be: "when you say the Chinese made their minds up, are you talking about a democratic process?"

>And a good response to that might be: "when you say the Chinese made their minds up, are you talking about a democratic process?" It was the early 19th century. You could count the number of democratic countries on one hand. (If you counted countries where only men could vote)

Really zero hands; there was nowhere in 1839 that would be considered democratic by modern standards (no-one even had universal male suffrage at that point, never mind universal suffrage).

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#54

Post by skrebbel »

dash2 wrote: post #34
skrebbel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be frank, it's clear the Brits were the baddies here. They used guns to force a state that had banned terrible drugs to unban it. Whether that state was totally nice or democratic or "Chinese" or whatever value you cherish, is besides the point. It does not legitimize any of what GB did during either Opium War, and therefore I disagree that it's "important to stress".

Some people think banning drugs is a bad idea, and that it's better to allow free trade. A good response to that would be, "yeah, but it was for the Chinese to make their minds up about that, not the British!" And a good response to that might be: "when you say the Chinese made their minds up, are you talking about a democratic process?"

Neither side of this battle thought that allowing 100% unfettered trade in the terrorities they controlled was a good thing. This wasn't some ideological war by starry eyed libertarians.

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#55

Post by barry-cotter »

agumonkey wrote: post #42
LAC-Tech wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the people he wrote that letter to didnt see them as equals. Did that letter suggest the British were seen as equals? The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text... --- "The kings of your honorable country by a tradition handed down from generation to generation have always been noted for their politeness and submissiveness." "Privately we are delighted with the way in which the honorable rulers…

Personally I read barbarians as describing ships enforcing trade, not the kingdom or its peaceful inhabitants.

This was almost the absolute tail end of separate systems of international diplomacy and law. The British were working under the Westphalian system where there’s a pretense at legal though not practical equality. Under the Confucian system China was the hegemon and all others were subordinate. States either paid tribute and were civilised tributary states or were barbarians. See how the Macartnety Mission refused to pay obeisance and thus was refused leave to establish diplomatic relations in 1792.

https://blog.gale.com/the-george-macartney-mission-to-china-...

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#56

Post by inkyoto »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #27
neither_color wrote: post #20

>We find your country is sixty or seventy thousand li [three li make one mile, ordinarily] from China Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous dru…

Unfortunately the people he wrote that letter to didnt see them as equals. Did that letter suggest the British were seen as equals? The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text... --- "The kings of your honorable country by a tradition handed down from generation to generation have always been noted for their politeness and submissiveness." "Privately we are delighted with the way in which the honorable rulers…

> Did that letter suggest the British were seen as equals?

No. Chinese emperors saw every other state outside the Celestial Empire as a tributary state and expected a full submission to the Chinese emperor, hence the language.

> The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text

«Barbarian» (蠻夷) was a term to refer to anyone else other than a direct subject of the Chinese Empire. Only the Chinese people were considered to be civilised, everyone else outside the Celestial Empire was not. As the opium wars progressed, one of the clauses in the follow-up treaty of Tianjin was forbidding the Chinese from the use of the 夷 character (meaning «a barbarian») to refer to the Westerners.

The word for «barbarian», 野蠻人 / 蠻夷 are still occasionally used as an insult between some Northern and Southern Chinese to refer to each other (as some Southern Chinese consider themselves to have descended from the true Tang Han Chinese and consider the Northerners to be bastard children of Mongolians, Manchu and the Han Chinese whereas some Northern Chinese consider the Southern Chinese to have descended from barbarian tribes, or Baiyue (百越) – the human history gets unpleasantly messy at times). Or as a pejorative to refer to Westerners, although mostly in the domestic nationalistic narrative.

> The constant, repeated subtext is that Britain is merely a far flung tributary nation of China […] The Imperial Qinq court was completely delusional.

Very much. In the historical context, the First Opium War was a disaster that had been waiting to happen and the British happened to be the trigger. The Daoguang Emperor was an exceptionally backward individual who flatly refused to grasp the understanding that the world had changed and self-imposed Chinese isolationist policies could not longer work, and that the Celestial Empire had fallen behind the progress. Most of his successors were just as myopic and delusional.

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#57

Post by boomboomsubban »

rsynnott wrote: post #52

> Take tea and rhubarb, for example; the foreign countries cannot get along for a single day without them. I'm curious where the idea that rhubarb was a major dependency came from. Or indeed the idea that it was a Chinese monopoly; it was grown in Europe in this era.

Rhubarb started being cultivated in England either a few decades earlier or at most a century, and the kind grown in Europe was a different species many considered inferior. Rhubarb was also frequently used in medicine, though it had little effect. It was a major export for centuries, primarily to Russia.

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#58

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #33
bshepard wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is important to stress that China was ruled, at the time, by a government that was widely seen as "Nonchinese" -- this sense of external rule surely had a great deal to do with the emergence of mass addiction, as the Ching state that imposed the laws had serious legitimacy issues (and would collapse less than a century later.)

The Manchu were not Han, but they were Chinese in a broader sense: they've lived for centuries in what is now considered Chinese territory, and by the 19th century they were already assimilated to such an extent that most Manchus spoke Chinese, not Manchu. Today there are still ~10 million Manchus in China, but virtually none speak the language anymore. (Admittedly this is in part because in the early days of Communi…

Manchu "foreignness" was a major contributor to the Taiping Rebellion, a war sufficient to kill something like 30 million people -- many more than were killed even in WW1. It was a big deal.

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#59

Post by throwaway0x7E6 »

beebmam wrote: post #5

For sure, the UK was deeply responsible for so much death and suffering from the Opium trade in China in this era. Just like modern China (and Mexico) should be considered deeply responsible for the current massive opioid crisis in the United States: 1. https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-... 2. https://www.science.org/content/article/underground-labs-chi... 3. https://www.npr.org/2020/11/17/9…

is it China and Mexico who refuse to secure the US borders?

is it China and Mexico who are behind the narrative that the war on drugs is immoral and unnecessary and that we'd better just legalize everything?

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#60

Post by throwbigdata »

_tik_ wrote: post #43
ammo1662 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, issuing regulation against drugs on their own territory is not a "war". But deploying Royal Navy to acquire foreign territory for trade is the "war".

I did not know Qing sent their Royal Navy to attack England. Can you provide any reference?

England took Hong Kong.
Post reply on HN